Contemporary endeavors and enterprises such as health care settings, e.g., hospitals, surgical centers, medical service centers, professional medical, dental, etc. offices, networks, affiliations, associations and other establishments use, generate and secure vast amounts of information. Such information comprises real, raw and/or filtered/unfiltered data, which is stored, updated, maintained and/or secured in and accessed from a variety of databases, data warehouses, business intelligence (BI) milieus, storage area network (SAN)s, Network Area Storage (NAS), etc.
In computing, providing, user-accessing (e.g., querying, etc.)—and often simply using such data, a significant level of expertise in one or more of a variety of technologies may be typically useful. For example, expertise in one or more of these example technologies may provide significant value: computing, database management, networking, Information Technology (IT) and/or information handling and retrieval, and in fact in some applications even Library Science (LS) and information retrieval.
Medical and other fields that demand technological sophistication often involve complex personal issues that relate to human interrelationships, demographic and socio-economic factors and related information. This, in addition to the technological sophistication and complexities of the underlying bio-medical, physiological, psychological, dental, pharmacological, financial and related issues in any given case. Thus, non-trivial levels of expertise in software, the semantics of relational databases and other skills are often useful in formulation queries and otherwise accessing data in the users' fields.
Yet, professionals and technicians in fields like health care and the medical arts are often extremely rushed, stressed, and challenged with the demands of their own specialties and responsibilities to focus, when they need important contextually relevant answers in real time or near-real time, on otherwise ancillary software skills and the formalities of database semantics. Moreover, the substance, context and/or details of subsequent queries may change significantly in real time or near-real time, according to results of earlier queries. For instance, interested professionals in various fields may ask different questions, based on answers extracted from the results of earlier queries. The value of e-mailed reports and Web-presented charts may thus have a brief, even mercurial or an ethereal “shelf-life.” This temporal information value diminution may be exacerbated by a trust deficit that recipient/users may hold in data, which underpin the presentation.
Moreover, to maximize their use of the wealth of information resources, computational, networking and database assets available in an endeavor as complex as a modern health care system, health care and other professionals/technicians in specialty fields, which do not necessarily focus on IT, typically interface with one or more IT specialists. For instance, consider that even formulating effective queries with correct database syntax can be a challenging task for a heart surgeon in a rush to access important clinical data. “Call IT” is a not uncommon refrain in such circumstances. The IT specialists may “tune and teach,” e.g., more-or-less custom “tune” the information resources for the non-IT users to most effectively utilize them and, even to add new data types, protocols, extensions, etc., and “teach” the non-IT users how to apply the custom-tuned settings or features. However, this IT specialist interactivity can add significant latency; days, even weeks can pass before fresh updated data retrieval is available to the non-IT users.
Approaches described in this section could, but have not necessarily been conceived or pursued previously. Unless otherwise indicated, neither approaches described in this section, nor issues identified in relation thereto are to be assumed as recognized in any prior art merely by inclusion therein.